CIS Airport Nets (SSB): Introduction and Examples

In the last time, I had been fascinated by Russian lady’s voices. First, I bumped into some very short, disciplined radio checks on the cis-Caucasian net on 5.568 kHz. I spent many hours until I got all identifications of these coded airports. Then I was absorbed by exotic destinations as Samarkand, Turkmenbashi, Vorkuta, Astana … onother frequencies. What a fascinating continent of DX!

Sometimes signals here in Germany were much better than between the stations themselves. Sometimes signals are faint, equipment old, pronunciation difficult to read. Often I fell victim to the devil of “pattern recognition” – understanding “Volgograd”, where “Vologda” was calling. A friendly UDXF member whose Russian is much better than mine had been of invaluable help in identifying some CIS civilian airport stations.

This journey had been so fascinating that I wrote a paper sharing this experience. And as encouragement that future readers may double the number of 50+ airports, documented by MP3s in this PDF. These audio clips are of some help in identifying such codenames like “Zootekhnik” or to sort out “Amderma” from “Naryan-Mar” in the Arctic or to get the ID of “Dasoguz Radio” in Turkmenistan.

As by-catch, there are shown/developed/suggested some strategies of monitoring – from propagation to fingerprinting SSB signals and documenting a net of stations, exchanging radio checks in a hurry. As example, I analyzed a session of 82 seconds containing no less than 28 radio checks, plus visualizing the net structure by a special (free) software. These suggestions may be adapted to other nets, like ALE – with even fingerprinting.

Caveat: Embedded multimedia content will only work with the most recent version of Adobe`s Acrobat Reader. And you have to save the PDF on your device (hard disk/stick), to make use of these multi-media.